So you post a recipe that works perfectly for you. It might serve as a good starting point for a newbie, but where do they go from there. I think we would serve the goal of advancing the art and science of pizza making much better if we placed less emphasis on formulas and more on important principles like:

1. Why pizza dough is NOT like bread? (the more I understand this one, the better my pies get)2. What are the different kinds of flours available and how and why are they used in different kinds of pies and ovens.3. What happens when you combine flour and water and how you can use this to your advantage (mixing, autolyzing, riposo, etc.)?4. What is the effect of salt on leavening process.5. What is the difference between a biga, poolish, preferment, starter, etc.?6. What kinds of mixers are "best" for pizza and why?etc., etc.

All of this information is covered in dribs and drabs throughout this forum and the glossary. I've lobbied before for a FAQ and have even volunteered to contribute to it. This effort seems more worthwhile than a collection of recipes.

my 2 cents.

Bill/SFNM

I'll add 2 more cents

As a newbie trying to learn more, and FAQ would be a nice read. I know the work involved would sure tax the time of those who volunteer. Right now, I'm just reading current posts and reviewing historical threads on NY and Neapolitan styles so I can choose which one to have as my first project.

I feel that there is a manageable set of "core recipes" that already exsist. These are "referenced" and "requested" often and have even developed there own names, usually referencing the initial or final developer and it's style ( e.g "Randy's Thin Crust"). We could easily attach a link to the orignating and any follow-up threads in the "core formula/recipe".

It also seems that newcomers do want to start reading the thread from it's conception.

******I have been tempted to just start a thread and let Steve use what he wants. I assume other will just jump in and help once it gets going.

I have a couple things holding me back.

I primarily speak "female". This site is male dominate. ANDAlthough I've been making pizza forever and a day, I don't have as much experience with many of the techniques covered within this forum.

Logged

The roundest knight at King Arthur's round table was Sir Cumference.They say he acquired his size from eating too much pi.

Actually, Lydia has hit on the real problem, and the best solution. As a newcomer, I can get along without a collection of all the recipes in one place. The real -- and irritating -- problem is that, often, in a comment, someone will say something like, "I tried So-and-So's variation of the Lehman recipe. Well, the Lehman recipe is easy to find at the Pizza Recipe link, but what on earth is "So-and-So's variation of the Lehman recipe?" Where can I find that? And by "find," I mean quickly and easily enough not to have to significantly interrupt my reading of the comment containing the reference.

Old hands on this site casually refer to recipes, and variations of recipes, as if everyone is familiar with them, but some of us -- newcomers -- are not. For example, I occasionally come across references to a dough recipe by a poster named "Canadave." After two several-minute tries, I've given up my search for the elusive Canadave dough recipe.

So... forget the separate recipe section. But if posters, when referring to recipes, could provide a link to that recipe, it would be very helpful and much appreciated. And (hate to sound like such a complainer) by recipe, I mean recipe, not the top of a thread of perhaps hundreds of comments though which I must search and not only find the recipe, but in the case of a thread containing more than one recipe, figure out which of them is the one being referred to.

In addition, as a Moderator, one of my chores is to see that posts are in the right place, and to move them around (or delete them) if necessary. Also, both Steve and I and others have more than once reorganized the entire content of the forum from an indexing standpoint (and rearranged posts) to make it more user friendly and easier to access. I agree with you that it would be nice if posters were more explicit and thoughtful in their posts in referencing other threads, posts, etc., but not all posters do that. Also, much of what is written on this forum is truly evolutionary in nature and it is not at all uncommon to find a single recipe morph into something new and take several pages of a thread to cover. In fact, it is perhaps much more uncommon to find a given recipe with instructions, photos, etc., all in one place. Even all the recipes for 00 “clones”, such as the one in the CI article that lead to this digression, are scattered in different posts on the forum.

I think that you will get the hang of the forum and its organization and tools the more time you spend at the forum. When I first joined the forum, I read every post. That would be tougher to do today because of the increased number of posts, and I don’t necessarily recommend that others do so, but I suspect I would still do it, but in manageable chunks.

I tried the CI recipe last night. I think that if I were a first-time pizza maker I would have been thrilled with the results.

I followed the recipe pretty closely (with the exception of incorporating a measly 5 minute autolyse while, umm, beer was being located). The resulting dough was pretty easy to handle, although more elastic than I'd expected so I ended up with a thicker crust than I'd expected. It was less than 90 minutes from pulling the ingredients out of the cupboards to pulling a baked pie out of the oven.

In cross-section, the resulting crust is beautiful - light and airy, with lots of big pockets (photo). Flavor was OK, but certainly not very complex. But it was surprisingly tough, and didn't develop any lovely dark spots by the time the cheese was starting to burn (I think oven time was about 7 minutes). I suspect my preheat was insufficient, as it's in the high 90's out here and I wasn't crazy about warming up the kitchen any more than necessary. And the beer drinkers were demanding food, which may have been a distracting factor...

Regardless, the results were encouraging enough that I'm going try it again (I've been looking for some way to use up my cake flour anyway), possibly incorporating autolyse, certainly letting the dough rest to relax as needed, and paying closer attention to the oven temperature. Maybe even an overnight rise. And less beer.

WOW. That looks wonderful. I'm going to play with this one. The only problem I have with it is that the idea of cleaning dough out of my food procceor makes me look longingly at Wonderbread and DiGiorno

Certainly the article in CI is much more sophisticated than the typical pizza article in popular magazines. And the author should be credited for going to such lengths to develop a better pizza, a goal that this web site is constantly trying to achieve. I read the article avidly looking for his formula for success. However, when all is said and done, I just wish the author would have said that the gold standard, or as close to it as one can get in this country, relies on Caputo flour and a brick oven. In brief, I thought the author was a bit over his head in trying to design the better Neapolitan.

OK folks, I need help. I'm a rookie that has a wood-fired oven. When my chef trained wife and I read the CI article, the question was "We do have one, how do we tweak the dough?". I run other peoples money for a living, so pardon my question that's probably way to elementary for this forum, but is there a 900 degree recipe that is better than the standard recipe we got with our oven? FYI, now we tend to use a bosch and grind our own